Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans.

It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world, but for all his shortcomings, he was much superior to thou mortals who hath embraced him to further thine own ends.”

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”

His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck,

starched curtain of heat

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere—the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

the salty flux and radiant slime of the glad-hearted fuck.

guilt is a neurotic emotion that Christianity was to exploit to fullest economic and political advantage; Hinduism was healthier in that regard—

warm vanilla moonlight

creamed through the windows,

something revolutionary and scandalous that bound them together out on the edge of behavior where the bond is tightest and sweetest.

this was one smile that didn't scare easily, it hung in there like a tenant who knows his rights and refuses to be evicted.

The word swam out through her smile like a blowfish swimming through a crack in a reef.

By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

WHEN WE ACCEPT SMALL WONDERS, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.

turning the Scriptures into a cross between German opera and a hockey game, as only a Protestant can do.

Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden vigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.

A foghorn Mark Twained on the river.

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist,

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”

The least wrinkled garment—and even it had as many folds as the wattles of a Republican president

“Sure and life is a lot o' misery, all right, and death is more misery, yet. Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o' neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unacceptable end. The trick is not to take such responses too seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o' flesh by cooperatin' with misery.”

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”

a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised),

plangent,

lambent,

gelid

Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than purists would like to believe.